A Suitable Vengeance (Inspector Lynley, #4)(33)

Lynley laughed, made a response. Lady Helen chatted on. As she did so, St. James took his drink and wandered towards two large Chinese vases that stood at either side of the doorway into the long Elizabethan gallery that opened off the east end of the drawing room. He ran his fingers over the smooth porcelain surface of one of them, tracing a particularly intricate pattern made by the glaze. Deborah noted that although twice he lifted his glass of sherry to his lips, he drank neither time. He seemed intent upon looking at no one.

Deborah hardly expected anything else after the afternoon. In fact, if not acknowledging anyone’s presence helped him to forget about it all, she felt quite as if she would like to indulge in the same behaviour even though she knew that, for herself, forgetting would not occur any time soon.

It had been bad enough tearing Brooke away from Sidney, knowing his behaviour was the product of neither love nor lust but violence and a need to hammer her into submission. It was even worse helping Sidney climb the cliff, hearing her hysterical weeping, catching hold of her so that she wouldn’t fall. Her face was bleeding and beginning to swell. The words she sobbed out were incoherent. Three times she stopped, wouldn’t move, merely wept. All that had been a living nightmare. But then at the top, there was Simon, standing against a tree, watching for them. His face was half hidden. His right hand dug into the tree’s bark so hard that the bones stood out.

Deborah had wanted to go to him. For what reason, to what possible end, she could not have said. Her only rational thought at the moment was that she couldn’t leave him alone. But Helen stopped her when she took a step in his direction, pushing her with Sidney towards the path to the house.

That stumbling trip back had been the second nightmare. Each part stood out vividly in her mind. Coming upon Mark Penellin in the woods; making inarticulate excuses for Sidney’s appearance and her distraught condition; approaching the house with an ever rising sense of trepidation that someone might see them; slipping by the gun room and the old servants’ hall to look for the northwest stairway that Helen had insisted was near the pantry; taking a wrong turn at the top of those stairs and ending up in the disused west wing of the house; and all the time terrified that Tommy would come upon them and begin asking questions. Through it all, Sidney had gone from hysteria to rage to despair and finally to silence. But this last was dazed, and it frightened Deborah more than Sidney’s earlier unrestrained agitation.

The entire experience had far exceeded dreadful, and when Justin Brooke walked into the drawing room, dressed casually for the evening as if he had not tried to rape a woman in front of five witnesses that afternoon, it was all Deborah could do to look at the man without screaming and flying into the attack.





CHAPTER 8


Good God, what happened to you?” Lynley sounded so surprised that St. James turned from his perusal of the Kang H’si porcelain to see Justin Brooke taking the proffered glass of sherry with complete nonchalance.

Christ, St. James thought, Brooke was actually going to join them, smugly confident that they were all too self-servingly well-bred to say anything about the afternoon while Lynley and his mother were in the room.

“Took a fall in the woods.” Brooke looked around as he spoke, making eye contact with each of them, challenging one person after another to expose him as a liar.

At this, St. James felt his jaw clench automatically to bite back what he wanted to say. With an atavistic satisfaction which he did not deny himself, he noted the considerable damage that his sister had managed to do to Brooke’s face. Claw marks scored his cheeks. A bruise rose on his jaw. His lower lip was swollen.

“A fall?” Lynley’s attention was on the inflamed teeth-marks on Brooke’s neck, barely obscured by the collar of his shirt. He looked at the others sharply. “Where’s Sidney?” he asked.

No one replied. A glass clinked against the top of a table. Someone coughed. Outside, at some distance from the house, an engine roared to life. Footsteps sounded in the hall and Cotter entered the drawing room. He stopped barely two feet inside the door, as if he’d taken a quick reading of the ambience and was having second thoughts about exposing himself to it. He looked at St. James, a reflex reaction that sought direction and found it in the other man’s detachment from the scene. He made no other move.

“Where’s Sidney?” Lynley repeated.

At her end of the room, Lady Asherton rose to her feet. “Has something—”

Deborah spoke quickly. “I saw her half an hour ago, Tommy.” Her face flushed. Its colour did battle with the fire of her hair. “She spent too much time in the sun this afternoon and thought…well, she’s asked for…a rest. Yes. She said she needed a bit of a rest. She did send her apologies and…you know Sidney. She goes at such a pace, doesn’t she? She wears herself out as if nothing at all…It’s no wonder to me she’s exhausted.” Her fingers wandered to her throat as she spoke, as if her hand wanted to cover her mouth to prevent the lie from becoming even more obvious.

In spite of himself, St. James smiled. He looked at Deborah’s father who shook his head weakly in affectionate recognition of a fact they both knew only too well. Helen might have been able to carry it off. Casual prevarication to smooth over troubled waters was more in her line. But Deborah was hopeless at this particular form of conversational legerdemain.

The rest of the party was saved from having to embellish upon Deborah’s story by the entrance of Peter Lynley. His feet bare and a clean gauze shirt his only bow to dressing for dinner, he was trailed by Sasha whose glaucous-hued dress made her complexion seem more sallow than ever. As if she would speak to them or attempt to intercede in what she saw as a coming conflict, Lady Asherton started to walk in their direction.